Category Awards

14th International ARC Salon

The Art Renewal Center is pleased to present the winners and finalists of the 14th International ARC Salon Competition! This year the ARC received over 4,300 entries from 73 countries. Our finalists represented here today constitute approximately 35% of works submitted, just over 1500 works. ARC has acquired 16 new works for the ARC collection, valued at over $125,000. Our highest award, Best in Show, went to Gregory Mortenson, for his figurative entry of Standing Proud, where Mortenson depicts a young girl he met while working on a humanities project in Haiti. About the work, Mortenson said, “This young girl is growing up in an orphanage in Haiti. She has survived an earthquake and a hurricane and is still standing proud.” With her feet firmly planted on rocky soil, this contemporary depiction of human strength meets the viewer eye to eye.

Come join us for the 14th International ARC Salon Exhibition consisting of 99 works from around the globe. We are extremely pleased to announce that we will be formally exhibiting the 14th ARC Salon Exhibition at Sotheby’s New York City location! Sotheby’s NY is the premier destination for auction and private sales. We are thrilled to be showing at this prestigious venue which will undoubtably showcase the 21st Century Representational Art Movement to an elite audience of collectors and art enthusiasts. The show is scheduled to first open at the European Museum of Modern Art, (MEAM) in Barcelona, Spain from December 6th, 2019 – February 16th, 2020, where it will hang alongside the MEAM’s representational painting and sculpture competition, Figurativas. A joint award ceremony will be held on December 6th at the MEAM. This awe-inspiring international event will have artists from all over the world present and hundreds of people in attendance, showcasing the true international nature and collaborative spirit of this new wave in contemporary art. The show will then travel to Sotheby’s, NY where it will be on Exhibit from July 17th – July 27th, 2020 with our Grand Public Opening on Saturday, July 18th from 11am – 3pm.

Updates and additional information about the live exhibition of the ARC Salon can be found on the Live Exhibition page.

For the first seven days the results are live on the ARC website, July 1 – July 8th, we will be holding an election for our second ever People's Choice Award! Visitors to the ARC website are able to vote for up to 10 of their favorite finalist or winning works. The winner will receive $1,000 cash and a full page in the ARC Salon Catalogue to be published by ACC Art Books, a division of a global publisher. Visit the People's Choice Award section on the ARC Salon results pages and click on the vote button below the works of your choice to cast your votes. Visitors will be prompted to login or create a free account so that we can track votes and prevent users from voting more than once. The winner will be revealed on July 12th, 2019.

This year the winner of the Da Vinci initiative Category, our category dedicated to works created by students 12 to 19 years of age, went to Celia Liberace, for her drawing of Forager. We are inspired to see this work with advanced technical skills created by an 18-year-old student, proving that high-school aged students are capable of learning these skill-based techniques and incorporating them into unique images with a unique voice. In addition, we have awarded Second and Third Place and eight honorable mentions in this category. We will be including a few of these amazing works by our artistic youth in the traveling 14th ARC Salon Exhibition.

We have two museum awards, a Purchase Award given out by the MEAM Museum in Barcelona Spain, which went to Karolis Greiciunas for his drawing of Old Days… , (This drawing has also won Second Place Portraiture), and an exhibition award given out by the Springville Museum of Art, which went to Ryan Brown. The Springville Museum has devoted a "Featured ARC Artist" gallery wall to their museum in their Founders Gallery, to be awarded to a new artist each ARC Salon Competition. Brown will have the opportunity to have a series of works hung at this prestigious location for the duration of this time period.

We are also excited to be having our second partnership with Fashion Week San Diego, where FWSD designers will be matched with the 8 winning artists' work and the designers will create an original couture outfit and look inspired by the work of art from the ARC Salon. After the first successful event at FWSD in San Diego last October, 2018 we decided we wanted to bring this event to NY while the ARC Salon Exhibition as a whole was on view. The ARC Salon winning works along with the specially designed garments will be on display with live models at Sotheby’s NY on July 25th. In addition, that day guests/attendees will be able to "vote" for their favorite piece and pairing. Winners will be announced the following day and additional awards will be given to the "team"/"individual" at that time. This will be an opportunity to promote Contemporary Realism to an audience who might not have seen it otherwise and to expose the Representational Art Movement to top fashion designers attending the event.

We have also for the first year worked with Windows to the Divine, who has awarded five artists a spot in their upcoming show entitled Contemporary Visions of Beauty, which will be held at Space Gallery in Denver, with the Opening Gala scheduled for Thursday, November 12th, 2020, with educational programming on Friday and Saturday, November 13th – 14th. Through their national network of collectors known as Collectors for Connoisseurship, they are known to have a large patron base and placement in the Windows to the Divine Exhibition will guarantee that many collectors are exposed to the artist and their work.